Jazzman Charles Gayle dispenses with such conventional notions as harmony and melody in his pursuit of pure sound

By Nicky Baxter

Most artists have endured rough stretches in the name of art, but free-jazz pioneer Charles Gayle's frighteningly obsessive devotion to his muse harkens all the way back to the Romantic era, when artists turned individual suffering for art into a heroic act.

Until a few years ago, tenor saxophonist Gayle was blowing his brains out, figuratively speaking, on New York City street corners and subway platforms with a battered tin cup to catch coins, playing what has been called Free Music--for free. On good days, he'd earn enough to buy himself a single hot meal. At other times, well, he wasn't so lucky.

Little is known about Gayle's nearly two-decade exile from jazz's mainstreet; nor does the 56-year-old native of Buffalo, N.Y., appear eager to fill in the blanks. He prefers to talk about the present, which began for him around 1987, when Michael Dorf, impresario of New York's avant-garde club the Knitting Factory, heard the street buzz and took the older man under his wing. Homeless, Gayle's first album after a lifetime of playing, was released on the Knitting Factory label in 1988.

A hipsters' paradise doubling as a club and record label, the Knitting Factory is renowned for its presentation of cutting-edge music, ranging from No Wave rock (Glenn Branca, Ciccone Youth) and alternativists (Sonic Youth, Henry Rollins) to "outside" players like Gayle. Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore and Rollins are both huge Gayle fans.

Now, the charismatic leader of the Charles Gayle Trio is preparing for a national tour to promote his latest album, Testaments (Knitting Factory Works), released late last year. The tour includes stops at the Agenda Club in San Jose Thursday (Feb. 22) and at the Oakland Museum's James Moore Theatre Saturday (Feb. 24). Joining Gayle on the tour are album sidemen bassist Wilbur Morris and drummer Michael Wimberly.

The trio takes up where the pointedly political New Thing/Black Music vanguard of the 1960s left off. Gayle's music dispenses with such conventional notions as harmony, melody and timbre in pursuit of pure sound. That sound may come off as mere cacophony to the uninitiated, yet the saxophonist's technical command of the tenor saxophone is unassailable. He is also a gifted baritone saxophonist and pianist.

Despite Gayle's application of sinus-clearing multiphonics, sharply disjunctive phrasing and wayward rhythmic patterns, Testaments is not so much assault as it is sonic seduction. The 15-minute-plus title track is a soul-bearing, utterly awe-inspiring experience.

Against Wimberly's wash of slashing cymbals and episodic rim shots and Morris' keening, almost conversational bass, Gayle's tenor is initially meditative. Imperceptibly gathering momentum, his playing becomes more frenetic, pitching wildly between honking harangues and paint-peeling shrieks and cries of salvation.

With his rhythm mates in hot pursuit, Gayle ends up banging at heaven's door with evangelical zeal. Just before the tune's coda, Gayle offers a brief solo, shrieking in tongues, yet the final denouement is achieved only when the tenor player switches from saxophone to piano, banging out a string of discordant notes.

Many listeners may hear the works of Gayle--and, indeed, those of Charles Mingus, Ornette Coleman and other proponents of New Black Music--as an impenetrable forest of savage, assaultive noise. This music, however, is far from arbitrary.

Actually, Gayle's "nonbelievers" are only half-wrong. In Gayle's music, there does appear to be an strong element of atavistic, "preliterate" emotionalism. As noted musicologist Thomas Pereza observes, "It is hard for [North Americans and Europeans] to hear something and not try to project a [Western] construct" in order to connect with it. Says Pereza: "Ultimately this music is about the spirit. And in order to appreciate it, one must strip away [white], Judeo-Christian preconceptions" and accept alternative modalities of being, hearing.

Gayle's style may sound cacophonous to listeners of more mainstream jazz, but it is a deeply spiritual music that he says is derived from a familiar source. The new album is based on his beliefs in both the Old and New Testaments. "I didn't know it was going to be thematic. I just composed on the spot."

"Testaments," like the CD's five other titles, is an explicit acknowledgment of Gayle's devotion to the most high. From the alternately meditative and roiling "Parables" (on which Gayle lays aside his tenor for the piano) to the plaintive lament of "Christ's Suffering" to the soaring ecstasy of "Jericho" (here, Gayle somehow manages to play both sax and piano simultaneously), this is a music of spiritual redemption and salvation.

"I grew up with religion," Gail says. "I'm a believer. My hope is to be as open and honest as I can. I'm not saying my music is about God, but I dedicate my music to Him." Intriguingly, Gayle maintains that playing "outside" can be traced to black gospel tradition, the music he grew up on. "A lot of church players played that way, in a sense," he claims, without elaborating.

Talking to him over the phone from his New York City apartment, Gayle sounds endearingly diffident. You sense that it's not easy for him to communicate his feelings verbally. It is difficult to get him to elaborate on any given point, whether it's music or his religious convictions. His remarks are punctuated by long, thoughtful pauses. He is by turns candid and somewhat cryptic; sometimes both at once.

After fumbling about for a moment, he reframes his thoughts on spirituality and starts anew. "Look, two things. When I was younger," he says, "I would talk to people and pretend to go along with whatever they said. Later on, I just began to feel it was time to be honest [about his religious beliefs]." It wasn't until his first record, Homeless, that, Gayle says, "I began talking about God ... but in life, I'd been open about it way before that."

Asked to elucidate his compositional process, Gayle claims ignorance. "I have no idea. I just wanted to challenge myself to be spontaneous." So how does he communicate his ideas to the band? "We just go by feel."

I approach the question from another angle. While conceding that his playing is influenced to some degree by New Thing tenors John Coltrane and Albert Ayler--the two names that crop up most often in discussions regarding his music--Gayle insists that his primary source of inspiration can be traced back to the church, where, he adds, he made his musical debut as a child on piano.

He was also profoundly influenced by blues music. Back in the early 1950s, when he was growing up, listening to blues was as natural as breathing. Inspired by Thelonious Monk and Art Tatum, Gayle would go on to play in blues and jazz units for a number of years before changing to saxophone. The switch, was, he says, more a matter of circumstance than design.

The latter half of the '50s had witnessed the ascent of the funky-jazz trio showcasing the then-newfangled Hammond B-3 organ. B-3 units quickly supplanted pianos as the keyboard of choice. Gayle wasn't a big fan of the instrument, and so, in order to survive, he learned to play saxophone.

"Another thing--and this is the truth," Gayle says, remembering those early years, "I met a cat who bragged about how good he was [on alto sax]. And I told him I'd beat him playing in six months--he'd been playing for years. So I got an [alto] and listened to 'Bird, Coleman Hawkins, Dexter Gordon."

Significantly, the latter two were most famous for their work on the tenor saxophone, which eventually became Gayle's instrument of choice.

Though conversant in bebop, Gayle claims that even then, he was working on a "new thing," although he admits, "I have to be careful. Ornette [Coleman] and [Charles] Mingus were already on the scene." He insists, however, "I didn't have to know these cats" to go beyond bop's increasingly restrictive parameters. "I was already doing it."

He adds, "In my mind, Monk had already split the atom. And if you listen to Duke Ellington, he was already doin' it, too, in another way. He played 'out' as you could get. So, to me, there was nothin' strange about [playing 'free']; I'd already heard that."

And what of Coltrane's deep tracks? Or Ayler's? "The problem is," he says, somewhat defensively, "I listened to both of those cats, 'specially 'Trane. [He] was something else, of course. But I'm not trying to copy anybody."

Which may have been part of Gayle's "problem." After moving from alto to tenor ("I could hear the tenor better," he explains)--and from Buffalo to New York City in the mid-'70s--his musical conception evolved more distinctly, even as it grew more challenging. So challenging that, during the '70s and early '80s, Gayle often couldn't buy a gig. And, like a true Romantic-era artist, rather than capitulate to the marketplace imperatives, he retreated to the subways and street corners, wailing in the name of the Lord.

Nowadays, Charles Gayle lives in relative comfort; he's far from rich, but he now earns enough to put a roof over his head and three squares a day in his belly. Not that he's sold out; far from it. Gayle is and probably always will be a Romantic warrior, metaphorically wailing at the walls of Jericho, letting his free music ring until the walls come tumbling down.